The Cleary-Spencer Email

The cool tech tools we’re building to help readers in this request are slowly shaping up, but in the meanwhile readers are posting their comments underneath documents they find interesting, and debates as to their meaning and importance are flowering. It’s all very gratifying. We’ll highlight the hot discussions here.

Reader “shocked” was the first to flag this document, which records an email sent by – gulp! – Lost Coast Communications General Manager Patrick Cleary. The date was March 2010, a few months before the primary election in which Cleary was standing for Fifth District Supervisor. Cleary sent a letter thanking several people – his “policy experts,” he calls them – for “wisdom” imparted over a recent lunch. Then he forwards them his draft response to a candidate questionnaire issued by the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights (HumCPR) and asks for input.

Among the recipients of the email: Humboldt County Senior Planner Martha Spencer. Writes “shocked”:

I’ll be darned. A county senior planner is one of “my planning experts” for a Supervisorial run, along with two of the usual advocates. I guess I thought public servants served, you know, the public? How can I get Kirk Girard to be “my planning expert?

John Matthews and I spoke with Cleary about the matter this morning, during our regular 10:30 a.m. LoCO segment on KSLG (94.1 FM, live stream at kslg.com.) Martha Spencer spoke with me shortly before we went on air; I relate her response to the readers’ questions and mine.